Thursday, 25 August 2011

How to navigate your way through life? It is surely a key question.
Most of us take bearings on our situation, and then set a course and plough on. Our minds control the action.
I can honestly say that from the age of 19 I have decided what I wanted to do, and then gone out and tried to do it.
Sometimes I succeeded, and sometimes I did not. But in all cases the journey was pretty much an exercise of will: Attempting to impose my will on the circumstances that confronted me in order to make the best of those circumstances.
Nothing really wrong with that, except that the great limiting factor in the whole equation was the extent of my own imagination. All my horizons were set at the limits of that imagination, and as a result they were severely limited.
When your mind is running the show, it can only ever create that which it has some experience of. And therefore it always tries to make life conform to what it believes it to be.
If it thinks that people are unreliable, it will gather evidence to that effect.
If it thinks that life is unfair, it will find the proof.
Therefore a life that is controlled by the limited imagination of our minds will always be limited to the capacity of our minds.
I have begun to try to let go of my mind’s insistence on what it thinks I should do, and open up to seeing what life out there wants me to do.
The difference is subtle. It involves taking bearings on my situation as before, but then not setting a course, but simply taking more bearings and allowing the wind to take me where it will: Allowing life to lead me to the actions that I need to take, rather than dictating those actions and trying to make life conform.
The key to acting like this is to give our lives the credit of having a natural intelligence that will guide us into the right place at the right time, if we will let it happen.
We have to give up the desire to control, and simply allow things to happen.
That is not to say that one should take no definite action; just that once action has been taken, we then review the situation, rather than deciding what to do next.
It means holding our ultimate goals lightly, and willing to change them as circumstances unfold. Not always deciding what one wants to do beforehand, and then ploughing on regardless.
Doing this frees us from the limits of our imagination and gives us whole new horizons that we could never have thought of on our own.
Life then becomes more like a voyage of discovery, rather than a race that has to be won.